GNU bug report logs - #19616
dist tarball contains hardlinks

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Message #11 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis <at> gmx.net>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Cc: bug-automake <at> gnu.org, bug-tar <at> gnu.org
Subject: Re: [Bug-tar] dist tarball contains hardlinks
Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 01:10:14 +0100 (CET)

On Fri, 16 Jan 2015, Paul Eggert wrote:

> Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
>>  Why is such behaviour desirable?
>
> It's more logical, since it causes tar to behave as if the symlink were not 
> there, and the pointed-to file was there instead.

But when the tarball is extracted, two files with same inode are created, 
which is kind of unexpected behaviour - at least for me - after creating 
the tarball with --dereference, i.e. I've explicitly asked to follow 
symlinks. And it beats the purpose some users have been using 
--dereference - to avoid storing links which have more restrictions (e.g. 
100 char limit).

> Using -hard-dereference bloats the tar image, but if that's a price you're 
> willing to pay then you have a solution to the problem.

Indeed that's what I chose as workaround, compression deals well with 
duplicated information so size bloating was minimal.


Thanks,
Dimitris

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